Intercultural management

The corporate culture : Michelin example

The corporate culture is defined by a set of rules of an organization, values shared, myths and taboos, or by the common way to going about a problem and how to carry it. But it is also allows us to characterize a company relative to another concerning how it react to different situations.
The corporate culture is what we can call the immaterial capital. More specifically, it is these values which form the philosophy of the company and which determine its charter of conduct. Made of all ways of thinking and acting, set of explicit rules or implicit system of cohesion and coherence, it is really the actual current value of a company.
Moreover, this culture is more or less important according to the company on which we choose to base. For example, two enterprises that have the same strategy, the same structures, will probably have different corporate culture. That’s what makes the firm priceless.
Consequently, it is really important to have a clear and strong corporate culture, since it’s what will unite the employees: succeed in formulating it explicitly is a way of establishing a deep link between society and its members.
Because each company is different from another, has his own customs and way of working, the corporate culture varies too. That’s exactly why we can’t define this notion clearly.
To illustrate this notion, I chose the French company Michelin. In order to understand it correctly, I think it is important to remind some information about the group.

The Michelin group

Created in 1889 in Clermont-Ferrand by two brothers, André and Edouard, Michelin aims at developing the idea of putting the innovation to serve modern transportation. From this point, they decided to embark on the tire production. The time passed and the innovation was more and more important, as their strategy was more and more developed. Nowadays, Michelin has a leading position in all tire markets but